Monday, July 31, 2006

The wife and I had a date night last night.

We started off with a nice dinner at Range, which was one of SF's hot new restaurants about a year ago. Apparently it's a little less hot now, because we were able to walk in and get a table without reservations. Hurray for being one step behind the coolness curve!

Dinner was tasty, the cocktails were thirst-quenching, and I romanced my wife with conversational gems about Ruby, the new computer programming language I'm studying. She got to hear sweet nothings about how easy it was to write certain types of software and seductive murmurings about syntactical oddities. It was a nice meal.

After dinner we were feeling frisky so we looked for a place to partake in one of our favorite activities, Scrabble. As luck would have it, we were a mere 2 blocks away from Ritual, the top-rated coffee shop in San Francisco.

I'd never been to Ritual before. Sure, my worldly friends had spoken highly of it, but it was always out of my way. Finally, my time had come.

The first thing I noticed about Ritual was that I was obviously the least cool person in the room. Granted, this is a feeling that I get fairly often, but it was more apparent here than usual. I would have bet money that Hank and I were the only people there without pierced genitals. It was like one of those rides in an amusement park where you have to be a certain height, except here you either had to be either pierced, tattoo'ed or at least use a Mac. It's miraculous that we weren't lynched.

The coffee was pretty good, but I don't know if I can tell the difference between good coffee and great coffee. My neighborhood coffee shop is also listed in the top 10 of the top SF coffee shops, so I do drink a lot of good coffee. Would a man with a coffee cup glued to his cheek drink bad coffee?

Anyway, the Scrabble game turned out well. We tied at 385 points each.

After we got home, I fired up my laptop and amorously cooed at my wife. "Baby, would you like to see that Ruby source code I was talking about?"

The Cocoa.app is what I think I saw demo'ed...it's been a while, but it was definitely part of the XTools stuff. Xcode maybe? I just barely touched the surface of Ruby, but I think it is a cool alternative to PHP, which is what I normally use for web dev. This is what I found on the Apple website about it. Maybe I can find my notes. Like most things, I was really excited about it for the next month or so, then forgot it. One of these days, I'll have to sit down and work my way through it.